Last night I dreamed that I inherited a haunted house. It was chock full of cursed/creepy objects, some of them good enough to stat up as D&D items.
Oracular Skull: This skull is set into the wall. When you make "eye contact" with its sockets, it says something like "pay me a tribute and I will answer any question you wish." It opens its mouth. If you put money in its mouth and ask a question, it will answer with a high degree of accuracy. The price varies based on the difficulty and importance of the question, from around 50 GP for something like "what is the most common hair color in the country" to 1000 GP for "what is the secret weakness of the lich king". The problem? The skull doesn't specify its price for each question. If you put in too little for a certain question, it gobbles down the money and says, "Not enough, ask again."
For extra creepiness, set this magic skull into a wall made of nonmagic skulls.
In my dream, I asked the skull, "What is your price structure?" hoping that this would be a free question. The skull replied, in an aggrieved tone, "I said, pay me a tribute and I will answer any question you wish." So you have to pay to find out the price of a question. Nice racket, dream skull.
So let's say I use this skull in a game, say on the third level of some dungeon. Let's further say that I make the skull's answers infallible, though brief. Does this break the game? I'd have to try it out to make sure, but I have a feeling it wouldn't. For most PC parties, its answers are extremely expensive, in several ways: 1000 GP is a lot, and it's easy to overpay if you need to beat an unknown price, and it can be somewhat taxing to get down to level 3 of a dungeon, even if you've cleared it before. It's certainly more expensive than the various spells that let you ask questions of the gods themselves.
Snake Ring: This is a big, showy, gem-studded ring, clearly worth a lot of money. Its central gem is a pointy crystal that sticks out like a needle. When you put on the ring, you discover that the central gem wiggles around like the needle of a compass. It does its best to point towards the nearest location of at least 1 pound of food (possibly in your backpack).
If you touch the ring to food, the gem turns into a 1 1/2-inch-long snake, crawls out of the ring, and eats a pound of food. After it finishes, it lets you know telepathically that it will perform a service for you. It can perform any service that a tiny snake can accomplish (1 HP, and with a bite that does 1 point of damage: poison save or the target falls asleep). It will return to the ring after it completes its task or after 1 day of trying.
Here's the weird thing about the ring: after each use, it requires double the food and is double the size: so on its second use it requires 2 pounds of food and is 3 inches long, and on the third use it eats 4 pounds and is 6 inches long, etc. On each use, its bite damage also goes up by 1 point.
In my dream, my friend was excited about finding the ring, but I was deeply suspicious of it. I wondered: once it gets big enough to eat, say, 160 or 320 pounds of food at a time, will it consider the closest person - maybe even the ring owner - to be the closest food source? At some point, is it going to go on some sort of food binge and eat all the food in the world?
Another disquieting thing in the dream, probably sparked by the events of the Mearls sidebar: we found the ring stuck on a weird, leathery, boneless, severed hand. In order to slip off the ring, my friend had to cut off a finger. How did the original owner's hand get like that?
The tiny house movement for apartment dwellers has arrived.
Think 200 to 300 square feet, and a kitchen shared with five similar units.
It's a new milestone for the Portland area's off-the-charts rental shortage, the third-tightest in the nation in the third quarter of 2013. And it might also be the key to a new model for apartment living that's designed to deliver relatively affordable rents for tiny units in highly desirable neighborhoods.
The new buildings, sometimes called "aPodments" or "micro-apartments," typically offer lightly furnished studios including a private bathroom. In order to attract tenants despite the small size, they're located in areas with one of the hottest commodities on the real estate market right now: excellent active transportation. Portland's first such building at 2250 NW Thurman St. proudly proclaims its Walk Score, Transit Score and Bike Score (88, 52 and 93, respectively).
And because each cluster of five units shares a kitchen, they duck Portland's controversial new requirement that large apartment buildings include auto parking whether or not future residents are likely to use it.
In the City of Portland, one in four rental households doesn't own a car.
Local transportation advocate Doug Klotz, who opposed the new rules, called the plan "the perfect way around parking requirements," which don't kick in until a building has more than 30 apartments.
"It's not 50 apartments," Klotz wrote in an email last week. "It's 10 five-bedroom apartments."
The 56-bedroom building on Thurman Street has already received its building permit, The Oregonian's Elliot Njus reported Tuesday. Last month, KATU reported that a similar one is proposed for 1525 NE 41st Avenue in Hollywood. Njus reported Tuesday that a group of neighbors are considering a legal challenge to the Hollywood project.
According to KATU, the Hollywood units will rent for $650 to $1000 each — cheap for a unit in the area but far more than usual on a square-foot basis. They'll also offer on-site bike parking, but no car parking.
Units like these have been shaking up the Seattle housing scene since 2008.
"Some people want them — need them, in fact — and they provide housing affordably, with a tiny ecological footprint, and in walkable neighborhoods," Alan Durning of the Seattle-based Sightline Institute wrote about them last year. "Occupancy is reportedly near 100 percent, because the price is far below that of studio apartments nearby."
Developer Jim Potter makes a similar case.
"We’re at a price point that no one else is delivering," Potter told The Oregonian. "It’s not for everyone, but it’s a choice, and we like offering choices."
The Real Estate Beat is a weekly column. Read past installments here. We are looking for a sponsorship partner. If interested, please call Jonathan at (503) 706-8804.
After the U.S. left Cuba back in the 60′s, most of the engineers went with them, so [Fidel Castro] told the citizens to learn how to make stuff themselves. They were called the National Association of Innovators and Rationalizers (ANIR), and that’s exactly what they did. This was the beginning of Cuba’s backyard innovation.
Fastforward a few decades and the 90′s were a very difficult time for Cuba. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a severe economic downturn almost crippled the country, and as a result a Cuban DIY culture began to flourish even more — out of absolute necessity. No money, no imports, only what they already had. Making and fixing things became a part of life, you couldn’t just go out and buy a solution to your problem, you had to do it yourself. This might be one of the greatest examples of what a full-flung maker/DIY society would be like — well, maybe minus the communist part.
The excellent video after the break is a short story about the designer [Ernesto Oroza], who started collecting examples of this DIY culture under his art project aptly called, Technological Disobedience. It’s worth the watch, so take a look.
[Thanks Nige!]
Oh goodness gracious, Super Hot is a great, ultra-stylish game concept. Now, I use the word “concept” because there’s not a whole lot to it yet (such is the nature of many 7DFPS standouts, sadly), but what’s here is a brilliant, almost puzzle-like take on time manipulation in first-person shooters. In short, time slows to a near-imperceptible crawl whenever you stop moving, enabling you to dictate the pace of, well, everything. It also looks really, really cool. Dancing between bullet storms with the greatest of ease – pausing to just marvel at the dust fleck of certain death mere millimeters from your forehead – is a magnificent feeling. Only problem is, it makes things rather easy.
GeorgedornReally cheap DIY ardiuno, for when you want cheap but not as tiny as the digispark.
Check out all the stuff crammed into a small swath of strip board. It’s got that characteristic look of a roll-your-own Arduino board, which is exactly what it is. [S. Erisman] shows you how to build your own copy of his YABBS; Yet Another Bare Bones Arduino (on Stripboard).
The strips of copper on the bottom of the substrate run perpendicular to the DIP chip and have been sliced in the middle. This greatly reduces the amount of jumpering that would have been necessary if using protoboard. A few wires make the necessary connections between the two tooled SIL headers that make up the chip socket. On the right hand side there a voltage regulator with smoothing caps. The left side hosts the obligatory pin 13 LED, and the crystal oscillator can be glimpsed on the far side of the ATmega328.
Pin headers along either side of the board have been altered to allow for soldering from the wrong side of the plastic frames. Note that there’s a three-pin hunk that breaks out the voltage regulator, and an ISP programming header sticking out the top to which those female jumper wires are connected.
Ringing in at as little as $2-$4.75 a piece you’ll have no problem leaving this in a project for the long hall. We can’t say the same for a $30+ brand name unit.
The video tour of Make Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania involves mostly a show-and-tell about the raw materials just waiting to find their way into members’ projects. The tour starts off outside the warehouse that house the hackerspace as well as an associated business incubator called Hive 4A. It then moves inside to give us a look at what they’ve got going on.
We love the space. There are really two kinds of buildings we see used in these tours. One type are commercial retail spaces, like HeatSync Labs or Workshop 88. They’re clean, well-lit, and in the public view. This is the other kind, behind closed doors and full or floor-space. The building features a really awesome wide-plank wooden floor. It plays host to a smattering of different equipment and a multitude of boxes, jars, troughs, and jugs full of all kinds of stuff. It looks like they’re beginning to get the parts organization under control. Old milk jugs serve as a first round of sorting. There’s also a nice little small parts rack built from plastic tea bottles and small cubby holes made of cardboard. See it all in the clip after the break.
